Transcription

Why do smart people make dumb decisions?
Why do conspiracy theorists think that we
didn’t land on the moon or that Hillary
Clinton is a space alien?
And why won’t Bernice admit that the new
Superman movie just isn’t very good?
We’ve talked about cognition before. We
usually refer to it as the process that we
use to think and solve crossword puzzles and
stuff. But really, cognition involves knowing,
remembering, understanding, communicating,
and to a certain extent, learning.
And as truly wonderful as our brains are,
we can be spectacularly bad at ALL of these
things.
We used to think our cognition worked like
a computer -- logically processing information.
But that cabbage-sized chunk of pink, wet
brain matter in your skull can do a lot more
than math, and the things that it does are
certainly not always logical.
Many experts argue that it’s cognition that
makes us truly human, and that everything
that comes with it -- our preferences, prejudices,
fears, and intuitions -- are what make us
the individuals that we are.
We’re not the only animals that show some
evidence of cognition, of course: Chimps and
gorillas exhibit insight and planning; crows
use tools; elephants teach each other.
But our capacity as humans to figure stuff
out is matched only by our ability to totally
misjudge stuff. As prone as we are to brilliance
and insight, we’re equally likely to succumb
to irrational thinking and false intuition.
So, to borrow a riff from Rene Descartes,
you think, therefore you are.
Which means you’re brilliant a lot of the
time. And sometimes, you’re just going to
look stupid.
[INTRO]
We all want to make sense of the world. And
one of the major ways our cognition allows
us do that is by forming concepts -- mental
groupings of similar objects, people, ideas,
or events. We like to lump things together.
Concepts simplify our thinking in such a fundamental
way that we usually don’t have to stop and
think about using them, they’re just there.
And yet without concepts, we’d need a unique
name for everything. You couldn’t just ask
me to shake the anglerfish -- because there’d
be no concept of shake or fish, let alone
stuffed, blue anglerfish.
And if I told you I was devastated that I
lost my anglerfish -- which I probably would
be -- I’d also have to explain my emotions,
their intensities, even the words themselves
that I had to use.
So basically, without concepts, no one would
ever get anything done. We’d all be like
a bunch of ents taking all morning to say
“Hey, what’s up?”
We often organize our concepts by forming
prototypes--mental images or pinnacle examples
of a certain thing.
For example, if I say “bird”--the general
shape of a songbird probably pops into your
head before like, a penguin or chicken or
emu, because robins and cardinals more closely
resemble our bird prototype.
Still, if I show you a picture of some crazy
creature you’ve never seen before, and you
note that it has feathers and a beak, you’ll
probably file it under the bird category because
it more closely resembles your concept of
bird than your concept of rodent or overcoat
or footstool.
Concepts and prototypes speed up our thinking,
but they also can box in our thinking, and
lead to prejudice if we see something that
doesn’t fit our prototypes.
A hundred years ago the sight of a female
doctor might have caused some heads to explode,
because in peoples’ tiny minds, the prototypes
of “doctor” and “woman” didn’t have
any overlap. And actually some people today
still feel that way. Haters gonna hate.
So it’s important to actively keep your
mind open mind to make room for evolving concepts,
and remember that concepts may sometimes hurt
as much as they help.
One of the biggest ways our cognition works
to our benefit, though, is through our ability
to solve problems.
We use our problem-solving skills all the
time: How to assemble Scandinavian furniture,
bake muffins with a missing ingredient, or
handle the crushing disappointment of the
new Superman movie.
And we approach problem-solving in different
ways -- sometimes we value speed; other times,
accuracy.
Some problems we figure out using trial and
error--you know, you try something and if
it doesn’t work, try it a different way,
and keep at it until something works. Trial
and error is slow and deliberate--which may
be good or bad, depending on the problem.
We can also use algorithms and heuristics
to come up with solutions.
Algorithms are logical, methodical, step-by-step
procedures that guarantee an eventual solution,
though they may be slow to work through.
Heuristics, on the other hand, are more like
mental shortcuts -- simple strategies that
allow us to solve problems faster, although
they’re more error-prone than algorithms.
Say you’re at the store, looking for a family-sized
bottle of Sriracha. You could use an algorithm
and methodically check every shelf and aisle
in the store. Or you could use heuristics
and first search the Asian or condiment sections--the
places that make the most sense based on what
you already know.
Heuristics may be way faster, but the algorithmic
approach guarantees you won’t overlook the
sauce along the way, because they stuck it
in the deli or whatever dumb thing they did
this week.
So algorithms, heuristics, and trial-and-error
are problem-solving strategies that involve
a plan of attack.
But sometimes we get lucky while puzzling
out a problem, and Aha!, out of nowhere a
sudden flash of insight that solves our problem.
I’ll use orange in the muffin recipe instead
of lemon! Or, Sriracha lives in the Mexican
section! For some reason!
Neuroscientists have actually watched that
kind of sudden, happy brain flash on neuroimaging
screens.
In one experiment, they gave subjects a problem
to solve:
What word can be added to the three words
CRAB, PINE, and SAUCE to create a new compound
word?
Then they asked the subjects to press a button
when they had the answer.
While the subjects thought about it, scans
showed activity in their frontal lobes, the
areas involved in the focused attention of
typical problem-solving.
But right at the Aha! moment, just as they
pushed the button, there was a clear burst
of activity just above the ear in the right
temporal lobe, which, among many other things,
is involved with recognition.
The answer, by the way, we already gave you
the hint earlier in the episode.
Where’s my fish?
Those sudden bursts of insight are awesome,
but you can’t count on them to solve all
your problems. And just because something
feels, doesn’t mean it’s truly correct.
Because as inventive and smartypants as we
may be, our cognition often leads us astray
in all kinds of ways.
For instance, we often look for, and favor,
evidence that verifies our ideas, while we’re
more likely to avoid or ignore contradictory
evidence -- a tendency known as confirmation
bias. This is really similar to the overconfidence
we’ve talked about, when you’re basically
more confident than you are correct.
When this kind of cognitive bias takes hold,
you might cling to your initial conceptions
in a kind of belief perseverance, even in
the face of clear proof to the contrary.
This happens all the time, and it can be maddening
for people watching it happen. People still
think that the earth is flat! It’s like...WHAT?
HOW? There’s space pictures!
I probably don’t need to tell you -- people
can really get weird and defensive when they
evade facts and choose to see only the information
that confirms their beliefs.
They may even become functionally fixed, unable
to view a problem from a new perspective.
Instead they just keep approaching a situation
with the same mental set, especially if it’s
worked in the past.
Say you’ve got a nail sticking out from
a board, and you’re like “I need to take
care of that!” There’s rocks, and bricks
all around you. But because of your functional
fixedness on the idea that only hammers work
on nails, you don’t even consider hitting
it with the brick, and instead you waste a
bunch of time in the garage looking for a
hammer, and you’re angry and frustrated,
and there’s still a nail sticking up from
the board.
So, our mental set predisposes how we think,
just as you’ll remember that our perceptual
set predisposes how we perceive.
This is what makes heuristics -- those super-convenient
mental shortcuts that we all use -- so easily
fallible.
In the 1970s, cognitive psychologists Amos
Tversky and Daniel Kahneman researched how
we make snap judgments, and discovered one
way smart people make dumb decisions.
They found that people believe an event will
be more likely to occur if they can conjure
up examples or memories of it, especially
if those examples are particularly vivid,
scary, or awesome.
So, say you’re in a casino and you win two
dollars at a slot machine. Suddenly every
flashing light and ringing bell in the place
goes off. But when you lose -- which is the
vast majority of the time -- it’s just...crickets.
With all their lights and noise-making, the
casino makes sure that wins are super vivid
and memorable, while losses just go away unacknowledged.
That way, the next time you’re standing
there with 100 bucks in your pocket, you’re
more likely to overestimate your chances of
winning, because the memories of winning are
more striking.
The more mentally available those memories
are, the more it seems that it’s going to
happen again. This is known as the availability
heuristic.
And it can warp our judgements of people,
too. If we keep remembering news footage that
shows people of a given group shooting guns,
that can shape our impression of the entire
group -- even if what we saw was only a tiny
minority within that group.
Essentially, we are great at fearing the wrong
things. We worry about being killed in a plane
crash or getting bitten in half by a shark
or accidentally choking on a dumpling.
Thanks to our brain’s b-roll of horrific
images, we come to fear what’s actually
very rare, instead of worrying about much
more common, but less memorable ends like
car accidents, cancer, and heart failure.
Our thinking can also be swayed by framing,
or how an issue is presented. Imagine you’re
considering climbing Everest or getting a
nose job or eating a bowl of raw blowfish.
I can frame the risks in different ways. Telling
you that you’ve got a 95 percent chance
of survival sounds a lot different than saying
five out of a hundred people die doing this
activity, though the information is the same.
Our cognitive minds are capable of incredible
intellectual feats and tremendous failures.
We can solve problems better than any organism
on the planet, but given the chance, we can
also mess up a pretty simple judgment every
day of the week.
But if we’re mindful of our capacity for
error -- and if we honor our ingenuity and
intellect -- I think our ability to solve
any problem is nearly infinite. And that,
gives me a lot of hope.
Seriously though where is my fish?
Today you learned how we use concepts, prototypes,
and our mental sets to think and communicate,
and how algorithms, heuristics, and insight
help us solve problems. You also learned about
how fixation, the availability heuristic,
fear, overconfidence, and belief perseverance
can get in the way of good decision-making
and thinking.
Thank you for watching, especially to our
Subbable subscribers, who make this whole
channel possible. If you’d like to sponsor
an episode of Crash Course, get a special
Laptop Decal, or even be animated into an
upcoming episode, just go to Subbable.com/crashcourse.
This episode was written by Kathleen Yale,
edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat. Our director and editor
is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor
is Michael Aranda, who is also our sound designer,
and the graphics team is Thought Café.

History

Philosophically, ruminations of the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the ancient Greeks. In 387 BCE, Plato is known to have suggested that the brain was the seat of the mental processes.[2] In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans are born with innate ideas, and forwarded the idea of mind-body dualism, which would come to be known as substance dualism (essentially the idea that the mind and the body are two separate substances).[3] From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century regarding whether human thought was solely experiential (empiricism), or included innate knowledge (nativism). Some of those involved in this debate included George Berkeley and John Locke on the side of empiricism, and Immanuel Kant on the side of nativism.[4]

With the philosophical debate continuing, the mid to late 19th century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline. Two discoveries that would later play substantial roles in cognitive psychology were Paul Broca's discovery of the area of the brain largely responsible for language production,[3] and Carl Wernicke's discovery of an area thought to be mostly responsible for comprehension of language.[5] Both areas were subsequently formally named for their founders and disruptions of an individual's language production or comprehension due to trauma or malformation in these areas have come to commonly be known as Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, the main approach to psychology was behaviorism. Initially, its adherents viewed mental events such as thoughts, ideas, attention, and consciousness as unobservables, hence outside the realm of a science of psychology. One pioneer of cognitive psychology, who worked outside the boundaries (both intellectual and geographical) of behaviorism was Jean Piaget. From 1926 to the 1950s and into the 1980s, he studied the thoughts, language, and intelligence of children and adults.[6]

In the mid-20th century, three main influences arose that would inspire and shape cognitive psychology as a formal school of thought:

With the development of new warfare technology during WWII, the need for a greater understanding of human performance came to prominence. Problems such as how to best train soldiers to use new technology and how to deal with matters of attention while under duress became areas of need for military personnel. Behaviorism provided little if any insight into these matters and it was the work of Donald Broadbent, integrating concepts from human performance research and the recently developed information theory, that forged the way in this area.[4]

Developments in computer science would lead to parallels being drawn between human thought and the computational functionality of computers, opening entirely new areas of psychological thought. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spent years developing the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and later worked with cognitive psychologists regarding the implications of AI. This encouraged a conceptualization of mental functions patterned on the way that computers handled such things as memory storage and retrieval,[4] and it opened an important doorway for cognitivism.

Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique[7] of behaviorism, and empiricism more generally, initiated what would come to be known as the "cognitive revolution". Inside psychology, in criticism of behaviorism, J. S. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow & G. A. Austin wrote "a study of thinking" in 1956. In 1960, G. A. Miller, E. Galanter and K. Pribram wrote their famous "Plans and the Structure of Behavior". The same year, Bruner and Miller founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, which institutionalized the revolution and launched the field of cognitive science.

Formal recognition of the field involved the establishment of research institutions such as George Mandler's Center for Human Information Processing in 1964. Mandler described the origins of cognitive psychology in a 2002 article in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences[8]

Ulric Neisser put the term "cognitive psychology" into common use through his book Cognitive Psychology, published in 1967.[9] Neisser's definition of "cognition" illustrates the then-progressive concept of cognitive processes:

The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. ... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.[9]

Attention

The psychological definition of attention is "a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information".[10] A key function of attention is to identify irrelevant data and filter it out, enabling significant data to be distributed to the other mental processes.[4] For example, the human brain may simultaneously receive auditory, visual, olfactory, taste, and tactile information. The brain is able to handle only a small subset of this information, and this is accomplished through the attentional processes.[4]

Attention can be divided into two major attentional systems: exogenous control and endogenous control[11] Exogenous control works from bottom-up and is responsible for orienting reflex, and pop-out effects.[11] Endogenous control works top-down and is the more deliberate attentional system, responsible for divided attention and conscious processing.[11]

One major focal point relating to attention within the field of cognitive psychology is the concept of divided attention. A number of early studies dealt with the ability of a person wearing headphones to discern meaningful conversation when presented with different messages into each ear; this is known as the dichotic listening task.[4] Key findings involved an increased understanding of the mind's ability to both focus on one message, while still being somewhat aware of information being taken in from the ear not being consciously attended to. E.g., participants (wearing earphones) may be told that they will be hearing separate messages in each ear and that they are expected to attend only to information related to basketball. When the experiment starts, the message about basketball will be presented to the left ear and non-relevant information will be presented to the right ear. At some point the message related to basketball will switch to the right ear and the non-relevant information to the left ear. When this happens, the listener is usually able to repeat the entire message at the end, having attended to the left or right ear only when it was appropriate.[4] The ability to attend to one conversation in the face of many is known as the cocktail party effect.

Other major findings include that participants can't comprehend both passages, when shadowing one passage, they can't report content of the unattended message, they can shadow a message better if the pitches in each ear are different.[12] However, while deep processing doesn't occur, early sensory processing does. Subjects did notice if the pitch of the unattended message changed or if it ceased altogether, and some even oriented to the unattended message if their name was mentioned.[12]

Memory

The two main types of memory are short-term memory and long-term memory; however, short-term memory has become better understood to be working memory. Cognitive psychologists often study memory in terms of working memory.

Though working memory is often thought of as just short-term memory, it is more clearly defined as the ability to remember information in the face of distraction. The famously known capacity of memory of 7 plus or minus 2 is a combination of both memory in working memory and long term memory.

One of the classic experiments is by Ebbinghaus, who found the serial position effect where information from the beginning and end of list of random words were better recalled than those in the center.[13] This primacy and recency effect varies in intensity based on list length.[13] Its typical U-shaped curve can be disrupted by an attention-grabbing word; this is known as the Von Restorff effect.

The Baddeley & Hitch Model of Working Memory

Many models of working memory have been made. One of the most regarded is the Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory. It takes into account both visual and auditory stimuli, long-term memory to use as a reference, and a central processor to combine and understand it all.

Modern conceptions of memory are usually about long-term memory and break it down into three main sub-classes. These three classes are somewhat hierarchical in nature, in terms of the level of conscious thought related to their use.[14]

Procedural memory is memory for the performance of particular types of action. It is often activated on a subconscious level, or at most requires a minimal amount of conscious effort.[15]Procedural memory includes stimulus-response-type information, which is activated through association with particular tasks, routines, etc. A person is using procedural knowledge when they seemingly "automatically" respond in a particular manner to a particular situation or process.[14] An example is driving a car.

Semantic memory is the encyclopedic knowledge that a person possesses. Knowledge like what the Eiffel Tower looks like, or the name of a friend from sixth grade, represent semantic memory. Access of semantic memory ranges from slightly to extremely effortful, depending on a number of variables including but not limited to recency of encoding of the information, number of associations it has to other information, frequency of access, and levels of meaning (how deeply it was processed when it was encoded).[14]

Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly stated. It contains all memories that are temporal in nature, such as when one last brushed one's teeth or where one was when one heard about a major news event. Episodic memory typically requires the deepest level of conscious thought, as it often pulls together semantic memory and temporal information to formulate the entire memory.[14]

Perception

Perception involves both the physical senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, and proprioception) as well as the cognitive processes involved in interpreting those senses. Essentially, it is how people come to understand the world around them through interpretation of stimuli.[16] Early psychologists like Edward B. Titchener began to work with perception in their structuralist approach to psychology. Structuralism dealt heavily with trying to reduce human thought (or "consciousness," as Titchener would have called it) into its most basic elements by gaining understanding of how an individual perceives particular stimuli.[17]

Current perspectives on perception within cognitive psychology tend to focus on particular ways in which the human mind interprets stimuli from the senses and how these interpretations affect behavior. An example of the way in which modern psychologists approach the study of perception is the research being done at the Center for Ecological Study of Perception and Action at the University of Connecticut (CESPA). One study at CESPA concerns ways in which individuals perceive their physical environment and how that influences their navigation through that environment.[18]

Language

Psychologists have had an interest in the cognitive processes involved with language that dates back to the 1870s, when Carl Wernicke proposed a model for the mental processing of language.[19] Current work on language within the field of cognitive psychology varies widely. Cognitive psychologists may study language acquisition,[20] individual components of language formation (like phonemes),[21] how language use is involved in mood,[22] or numerous other related areas.

Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain, which are critical in language

Significant work has been done recently with regard to understanding the timing of language acquisition and how it can be used to determine if a child has, or is at risk of, developing a learning disability. A study from 2012, showed that while this can be an effective strategy, it is important that those making evaluations include all relevant information when making their assessments. Factors such as individual variability, socioeconomic status, short-term and long-term memory capacity, and others must be included in order to make valid assessments.[20]

Metacognition

Metacognition, in a broad sense, is the thoughts that a person has about their own thoughts. More specifically, metacognition includes things like:

How effective a person is at monitoring their own performance on a given task (self-regulation).

A person's understanding of their capabilities on particular mental tasks.

Much of the current study regarding metacognition within the field of cognitive psychology deals with its application within the area of education. Being able to increase a student's metacognitive abilities has been shown to have a significant impact on their learning and study habits.[24] One key aspect of this concept is the improvement of students' ability to set goals and self-regulate effectively to meet those goals. As a part of this process, it is also important to ensure that students are realistically evaluating their personal degree of knowledge and setting realistic goals (another metacognitive task).[25]

Imagination inflation: imagining an event that did not occur and having increased confidence that it did occur

Modern

Modern perspectives on cognitive psychology generally address cognition as a dual process theory, expounded upon by Daniel Kahneman in 2011.[26] Kahneman differentiated the two styles of processing more, calling them intuition and reasoning. Intuition (or system 1), similar to associative reasoning, was determined to be fast and automatic, usually with strong emotional bonds included in the reasoning process. Kahneman said that this kind of reasoning was based on formed habits and very difficult to change or manipulate. Reasoning (or system 2) was slower and much more volatile, being subject to conscious judgments and attitudes.[26]

Applications

Abnormal psychology

Following the cognitive revolution, and as a result of many of the principle discoveries to come out of the field of cognitive psychology, the discipline of cognitive therapy evolved. Aaron T. Beck is generally regarded as the father of cognitive therapy.[27] His work in the areas of recognition and treatment of depression has gained worldwide recognition. In his 1987 book titled Cognitive Therapy of Depression, Beck puts forth three salient points with regard to his reasoning for the treatment of depression by means of therapy or therapy and antidepressants versus using a pharmacological-only approach:

1. Despite the prevalent use of antidepressants, the fact remains that not all patients respond to them. Beck cites (in 1987) that only 60 to 65% of patients respond to antidepressants, and recent meta-analyses (a statistical breakdown of multiple studies) show very similar numbers.[28]2. Many of those who do respond to antidepressants end up not taking their medications, for various reasons. They may develop side-effects or have some form of personal objection to taking the drugs.3. Beck posits that the use of psychotropic drugs may lead to an eventual breakdown in the individual's coping mechanisms. His theory is that the person essentially becomes reliant on the medication as a means of improving mood and fails to practice those coping techniques typically practiced by healthy individuals to alleviate the effects of depressive symptoms. By failing to do so, once the patient is weaned off of the antidepressants, they often are unable to cope with normal levels of depressed mood and feel driven to reinstate use of the antidepressants.[29]

Social psychology

Many facets of modern social psychology have roots in research done within the field of cognitive psychology.[citation needed]Social cognition is a specific sub-set of social psychology that concentrates on processes that have been of particular focus within cognitive psychology, specifically applied to human interactions. Gordon B. Moskowitz defines social cognition as "... the study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the people in our social world".[30]

The development of multiple social information processing (SIP) models has been influential in studies involving aggressive and anti-social behavior. Kenneth Dodge's SIP model is one of, if not the most, empirically supported models relating to aggression. Among his research, Dodge posits that children who possess a greater ability to process social information more often display higher levels of socially acceptable behavior. His model asserts that there are five steps that an individual proceeds through when evaluating interactions with other individuals and that how the person interprets cues is key to their reactionary process.[31]

Developmental psychology

Many of the prominent names in the field of developmental psychology base their understanding of development on cognitive models. One of the major paradigms of developmental psychology, the Theory of Mind (ToM), deals specifically with the ability of an individual to effectively understand and attribute cognition to those around them. This concept typically becomes fully apparent in children between the ages of 4 and 6. Essentially, before the child develops ToM, they are unable to understand that those around them can have different thoughts, ideas, or feelings than themselves. The development of ToM is a matter of metacognition, or thinking about one's thoughts. The child must be able to recognize that they have their own thoughts and in turn, that others possess thoughts of their own.[32]

One of the foremost minds with regard to developmental psychology, Jean Piaget, focused much of his attention on cognitive development from birth through adulthood. Though there have been considerable challenges to parts of his stages of cognitive development, they remain a staple in the realm of education. Piaget's concepts and ideas predated the cognitive revolution but inspired a wealth of research in the field of cognitive psychology and many of his principles have been blended with modern theory to synthesize the predominant views of today.[33]

Educational psychology

Modern theories of education have applied many concepts that are focal points of cognitive psychology. Some of the most prominent concepts include:

Metacognition: Metacognition is a broad concept encompassing all manners of one's thoughts and knowledge about their own thinking. A key area of educational focus in this realm is related to self-monitoring, which relates highly to how well students are able to evaluate their personal knowledge and apply strategies to improve knowledge in areas in which they are lacking.[34]

Declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge: Declarative knowledge is a persons 'encyclopedic' knowledge base, whereas procedural knowledge is specific knowledge relating to performing particular tasks. The application of these cognitive paradigms to education attempts to augment a student's ability to integrate declarative knowledge into newly learned procedures in an effort to facilitate accelerated learning.[34]

Knowledge organization: Applications of cognitive psychology's understanding of how knowledge is organized in the brain has been a major focus within the field of education in recent years. The hierarchical method of organizing information and how that maps well onto the brain's memory are concepts that have proven extremely beneficial in classrooms.[34]

Personality psychology

Cognitive therapeutic approaches have received considerable attention in the treatment of personality disorders in recent years. The approach focuses on the formation of what it believes to be faulty schemata, centralized on judgmental biases and general cognitive errors.[35]

Cognitive psychology vs. cognitive science

The line between cognitive psychology and cognitive science can be blurry. The differentiation between the two is best understood in terms of cognitive psychology's relationship to applied psychology, and the understanding of psychological phenomena. Cognitive psychologists are often heavily involved in running psychological experiments involving human participants, with the goal of gathering information related to how the human mind takes in, processes, and acts upon inputs received from the outside world.[36] The information gained in this area is then often used in the applied field of clinical psychology.

Cognitive science is better understood as predominantly concerned with gathering data through research. Cognitive science envelopes a much broader scope, which has links to philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and particularly with artificial intelligence. It could be said that cognitive science provides the database of information that fuels the theory from which cognitive psychologists operate.[37] Cognitive scientists' research sometimes involves non-human subjects, allowing them to delve into areas which would come under ethical scrutiny if performed on human participants. I.e., they may do research implanting devices in the brains of rats to track the firing of neurons while the rat performs a particular task. Cognitive science is highly involved in the area of artificial intelligence and its application to the understanding of mental processes.

Criticisms

In the early years of cognitive psychology, behaviorist critics held that the empiricism it pursued was incompatible with the concept of internal mental states. Cognitive neuroscience, however, continues to gather evidence of direct correlations between physiological brain activity and putative mental states, endorsing the basis for cognitive psychology.[38]

Some observers have suggested that as cognitive psychology became a movement during the 1970s, the intricacies of the phenomena and processes it examined meant it also began to lose cohesion as a field of study. In Psychology: Pythagoras to Present, for example, John Malone writes: "Examinations of late twentieth-century textbooks dealing with "cognitive psychology", "human cognition", "cognitive science" and the like quickly reveal that there are many, many varieties of cognitive psychology and very little agreement about exactly what may be its domain." [3] This misfortune produced competing models that questioned information-processing approaches to cognitive functioning such as Decision Making and Behavioral Science.